


To Our Final Spring

by enmity



Category: Tales of Legendia
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 11:37:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18387662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: How it might have happened.





	To Our Final Spring

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS THE MOST CURSED ONE YET

His hand around her waist returns smeared with red. Her blood drying with his own on his Orerines disguise, and when she looks up at him, Fenimore’s frown is almost apologetic.

“I’m surprised you could carry us all the way here.” She coughs. Her voice catches at air. They hadn’t needed this, a long time ago – too long ago, before the invaders had come and driven them off the territory rightfully theirs – before any of them had been born. Nobody in the village knows peace as anything beyond a footnote from distant history. “It looked for a moment there – like you were going to die.”

“Can you move?” Walter asks.

For a second, her shoulders tense, forgetting the complacence that comes with exhaustion. Spindly fingers push the stray bangs out of her eyes; there is blood in her hair, too, and it runs ribbon-like streaks among the golden strands, a rust-colored stain on her circlet, nothing more than an offering of cheap metal and reflected light.

It’s a hot, breezeless day. Fenimore’s palm clutches at the ground, trying to pull the rest of her up. Having sensed his Teriques losing the strength to manifest, he’d set her down as carefully as he knew how. “…Worry about yourself first.”

_At least I can stand._

“—I’ll walk,” she speaks before he finishes the thought. The glimpse of scars fresh and old alike under her sleeve passes as quickly as the gasp between her teeth as she wobbles herself upright. Lashes, he thinks instinctively, then needles. She hardly reaches taller than his shoulders. “They’re just old wounds. Don’t worry about it. They never heal right, anyway.”

He pauses at her bony wrists, the insistent flakes of red under her nails. For a second, he forgets that he has seen worse. Fenimore is young – but so many of them were too. 

“We’ll go through the forest,” Walter says. “The base isn’t far. We should hurry.”

—

“Are you upset?”

Leaves and branches trample underfoot. He doesn’t look over his shoulder.

“What?”

“It wasn’t me you were looking for,” Fenimore says, plain and simple and unvarnished, “was it?” Her footsteps cease momentarily before picking up the pace once more. The canopy’s shadows would swallow an unsuspecting person whole, but he has prepared himself for this eventuality as much as he has anything else. Another weary exhale, and she asks – “You’re fine with leaving her behind?”

He would’ve been vastly outnumbered. Too many variables and hazards and uncertainties to take into account, and besides the Merines had willingly leapt at the chance to buy them time. To honor her decision by leaping straight into the monster’s den with his injuries would be nothing but suicide. And as for that man … the day had come when Walter would recall the name with the same blazing anger as he’d felt so long ago.

“You’re right,” she interrupts briskly, crushing the weeds and dirt in her path forward. “It’s a silly question. You would have taken the shot if you knew you stood a chance. But you didn’t, so. Here we are.”

He gripes, “Are you always this ungrateful?”

“Not by far. Mind you, I _am_ thankful, Walter. Very much so. I was just acknowledging where I stand between you and the _Merines_ , that’s all.”

—

He would have helped her regardless.

 _You’re one of us,_ he could’ve said. _That’s reason enough._

So he doesn’t know why he didn’t.

—

“Fenimore.” He frowns vaguely, arms crossed in what he hopes is a clear enough display of impatience. Another dry, windless day; any weather is bad for war, but more so the finer they are. Won’t be long now, he thinks. Won’t be long before the Merines will be saved, before she sees the truth unclouded by that man’s wretched influence. “What do you want?”

She tilts her head mildly at the identical rows of automata whirring to life behind him. “Those things suit you.”

“I’m working. Leave me be.”

“It’s true, though: you and sentinels. Has anyone ever told you that?” She steps forward. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if it hurts to keep your face scrunched up like that.”

“I’ve always looked like this.”

“Exactly my point,” Fenimore replies, sounding almost proud, mouth turning up in an expression he recognizes from her more readily than he ought to.

“Did you come here just to say that?”

“Every day I understand more the plight of that poor Oscar.” She folds her arms. Her bandages must have been changed recently. “Is it overstepping my bounds to wish you good luck? Knowing you, it probably is.”

“I acknowledge the sentiment,” Walter replies, though unbeknownst to Fenimore he excised _luck_ from the list of things he counted on the very day that intruder had arrived, carving himself a space beside the Merines as effortlessly as he had broken through the barrier and the townsfolk’s suspicion with his disarming meekness and soft-spoken words – a memory that burns white-hot with perfect clarity, even now. “Will that be all?”

“No,” she says, gestures to the automata, the small thing tucked behind her skirt as if it has something to hide from. “See? I’m returning this. It just up and started following me this morning – I was wondering if you could do something about it.”

He has half an irrational urge to mirror her earlier expression; wipes it clean it from his mind a second later. “I can’t,” he says. “It’s defective. It won’t fight or obey me anymore.”

She bristles, “Don’t say that like it’s my fault.”

“Keep it,” he says. “Not as if you have much of a choice in the matter. It might be defective, but you might still find some mileage out of it.”

“If you put it that way.” She sighs, thoroughly unconvinced. She crouches to examine the automata, one hand pressed against her knee. “Hey.”

“What?”

“Promise me Shirley will come back safe.”

The words that follow come quickly from a dizzying combination of memory and rehearsal. “She’s the Merines. If she doesn’t, the future for us Ferines is done for. It’s always been my duty to protect her. That’s why-- I’ll make sure--"

“I don’t know why I expect anything from you.” A sigh, “But it’s all right.”

He blinks down at her. “I’m not sure how.”

So returns the misplaced smile, touched by an emotion he doesn’t recognize immediately, “Don’t stress yourself over it.”

—

The day the Merines’ heart embraces the will of the sea, Walter takes to the skies with Fenimore a second time. The girl ( _corpse, now_ ) is still as light as he remembers, and he imagines none of her old scars have faded.

She could be dreaming, save for the coldness of her skin and the hole ripping her stomach.  

Another clear, bright day. They’re dizzyingly high up. He remembers how back then, Fenimore had tried her hardest not to squirm, to look down and witness the long, hypothetical drop. He’d clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes, then.

Now she doesn’t move at all – every one of her limbs as languid as that of a doll or a dead, dead girl. Murdered. The sword sliding cleanly through her, and they hadn’t aimed for the heart, uncaring of whether her end would be instantaneous or put her through the agony of bleeding out.

Scum, all of them.

 _She did it for the sake of the Merines,_ said Maurits. _It was a noble sacrifice. Surely if anyone understands, it would be you._

He’d accepted his role and his duties knowing he might someday die for them. That much was true. But still, he thought. But still.

 _Fenimore,_ he wondered, _did you—_

Her blood continues to seep. His uniform is a mess, smeared red and damp like the arm he’d thrown around her to lift her up, too many things swirling in his head at once when he wants to think of nothing; nothing at all but white noise and the numbing weight of a corpse in his arms.

 _Give her a proper burial,_ the Merines had requested.

“Just a little further.”

—

Her resting place is a warm, shady spot, with a tree for company. The sky is a bright, painful blue, and he has to squint away the light catching in his eyes. The automaton continues to stand by the marker, infinitely patient, unaware of the world beyond the simple certainty of its task.

Walter stands, stained by dirt and blood and the anger smoldering in the pit of his stomach, and it isn’t easy to look at the grave at all. It isn’t, will never be easy, no matter how much that part of him tries to remind him of the ones who’d suffered worse, the ones who came and went and languished and perished before her.

And it’s far too late for realizations, besides.

The automaton, destined to grieve eternally, accepts the flower without fuss. The petals are thin, cyan, made for withering. He looks at it, then the grave, the shimmering sky.

“I’ll fulfill my duty. I’ll protect the Merines. So that – ” _you won’t have died in vain_ , “so that the next time I return here, the world will have become what Nerifes intended.”

Once again, he summons his Teriques. Her grave becomes smaller and smaller.

He doesn’t let himself look back.


End file.
